Demand for computational resources from organizations and individuals continues to grow. Increasingly, data centers meet this demand by providing large amounts of data processing and data storage capacity in a concentrated physical space. Some data centers may provide computing as a service, giving customers the flexibility to consume computational resources on an as-needed basis while sparing the customers the financial and administrative burdens of maintaining the underlying physical computing infrastructure. Other data centers may provide large-scale computation for a single organization. In either case, the optimization of data centers becomes increasingly central to computation as data centers grow and proliferate.
Optimizing data centers involves many factors: power consumption, cooling, device cost, device reliability, device administration (installing, configuring, maintaining, replacing, moving, and removing devices), scalability, redeployment flexibility, human environmental comfort, human accessibility to devices, physical plant construction and maintenance, and physical plant footprint are examples of such factors. Unfortunately, due to competing constraints (e.g., power consumption vs. cooling, scalability vs. physical plant footprint), optimizing data centers poses a difficult problem. However, due to the highly commoditized nature of computing, an improvement to data center design can unlock a tremendous amount of value for data center operators and consumers.